Medical Professionals search Experience through Medical Search Engines

Abstarct: Introduction: Using search engines to find information has become a daily activity for medical professionals. They must be able to search competently for evidence to support practice contribute to more effective and efficient patient care. As search engines have become more popular, user’s expectations of search interfaces have increased .They need self- service from intuitively usable search engines that deliver the right result quickly. Objectives: This paper concentrates on information retrieval techniques that medical professionals used in medical search engines Pub Med, MedicalINDX and Highwire, focus on their search strategies and determine how these strategies help improve a search session and mapped their search behavior to better information retrieval on medical search engines. Methods: This is a qualitative research based on semi-structured interviews and participant observation. Results: Based on research findings, medical professionals used a complex combination of information retrieval techniques to obtain clinical information from medical search engines. They must be able to search competently for evidence to support practice contribute to more effective and efficient patient care. Conclusions: Results show that Pub Med, MedicalINDX and Highwire are large effective medical search engines for improvement to help medical professionals get more accurate and useful information, but the use of appropriate terminology is essential for a successful search similarity and the ability to comprehend presented search results is equally important.

Medical Professionals, Search behavior, Medical Search engines, PubMed, MedicalINDX, Highwire